Fridge Box Special is the culmination of various ideas bound together during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

The music is an amalgamation of musical styles bound together by a post minimal thread: a repeating cell presented immediately in the soprano part. The music builds a rock influenced post minimal groove to support the cell before settling into a true minimalist flurry of notes. This serves as the theme or A section for the vague rondo form of the work. The theme is presented in a variety of ways, from the initial post minimalism to blues to a movie score-esque treatment.

The work’s inception was a rather simple one, as it stemmed from simply wanting to write another work for saxophone quartet. But this one was unique, because I started on it during spring break of 2020, as the social distancing practice was just starting to be taken seriously in light of the growing number of COVID-19 cases. As I was confined at home with very little to do, the first draft of the piece (from which very little notes would change in the final draft) was completed in a single day. Whether this was the result of a day of profound inspiration or a result of the quarantine-induced boredom is anyone’s guess.

The title originally didn’t mean anything and was chosen arbitrarily to give a minimal work a very large title, thus the notation on the title page. As the work progressed, it came to refer to the way the music was constructed by cobbling together various ideas with a post minimal thread, much like the process of gathering seemingly unrelated ingredients for the latest inventive meal from a limited refrigerator. The work’s entire structure dissolves from a traditional rondo form as it progresses, presenting variations on the A material and blurring the lines between sections as it progresses. All in all, the work is an attempt to present various styles of music idiomatic to the saxophone in a way that plays with the listener’s expectations.